


And Whistles Thrice

by Derry Rain (smakibbfb)



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Character Death, Gen, everybody's dead dave
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-27
Updated: 2020-12-27
Packaged: 2021-03-11 01:55:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,509
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28367268
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/smakibbfb/pseuds/Derry%20Rain
Summary: In which Crozier grows old, but never alone.For Terror bingo promptReunions.
Comments: 12
Kudos: 21
Collections: The Terror Bingo





	And Whistles Thrice

Jopson is the first one Crozier sees, just a few days after James Ross has finally arrived, stayed and gone, and frankly, he feels like he should be more surprised when he does. The razor he is using stills against his skin as he sees his old steward’s shape in the mirror, standing still and tall in the doorway of his small tent. The last time Crozier saw Jopson, he was thin, bruised and rough, bloodied against cold stone. Now though, he is as hale, as bright and clean shaven, as he was the first day they met. He meets his eyes in the reflection of the mirror.

“I’m getting good at this,” Crozier tells him, indicating the wet line of soap on his face. Jopson smiles. 

“You promoted me, remember?” he says, lightly, “No need to worry about you anymore.”

“You do though, don’t you?”

Jopson smiles.

“Don’t tell the other lieutenants, sir,” he says, “I’ll never hear the end of it.”

The apparition fades away a second or two later. After a moment, watching the space where Jopson had been, Crozier resumes his shaving with a steady hand.

He is mildly more surprised when he walks outside some long time later, and finds Edward Little sitting, head bowed, on a small outcropping of rock. He rests his elbows on his thighs as he looks up at his once-captain with dark, sorrowful eyes and Crozier drops his pack on the ground. He settles himself beside Little, and notices that though his presence looks solid, there is no warmth to it, no weight, no press of shoulder against shoulder. When he tries to put a comforting hand on Little’s arm, once more clad in his old uniform, his fingers sink through like he’s caught in a spider web. 

“It’s all right,” Crozier says. “I _know_ you tried, Edward.”

Little sighs, and threads of golden gossamer disappear with him on the breeze.

It is not two weeks later that James Fitzjames comes strolling into Francis’ tent. His long legs stretch out as he sits down heavily on the small stool Francis recovered from _Terror_ what feels like decades ago now, though it has not been more than a few years. Francis tilts his head and regards him for a moment.

“Is there something I can do for you, James?” he asks. Fitzjames shakes his head merrily, and starts poking his fingers through the small collection of objects on Francis’ table. He picks each item up and inspects it in the thin stream of sunlight that is coming in through the tents opening. His eyes are bright, curious and interested. 

“You’ve made quite a life for yourself,” he says at last. Crozier looks around his tent and shrugs. 

“I suppose.”

“Don’t suppose,” Fitzjames tells him. “You have. Didn’t I tell you, Francis?”

He smiles, a wide, toothy thing that makes Crozier’s heart flip in his chest. 

When he blinks again, only sunlight remains.

Years pass before Crozier sees any of them again. He walks slower these days, his legs shakier than he remembers them ever being. The children still crowd round him when he walks through the camp, begging stories, but now the littlest ones are chased away by the teenagers he used to know at their size, who chide their younger siblings to leave Crozier to his peace. He wonders sometimes when he became such a beloved uncle. 

It is a cold, long night, after a cold long day, when he ducks into his tent to sleep and finds Jopson and Fitzjames sitting cross-legged on the floor, apparently intent on a game of chess, the board spread between them, rows of captured pieces laid neatly to one side.

“Your man is much better at this than he let on,” Fitzjames complains without looking up. “I can’t believe that I’m being hustled at _chess_.”

“You always did play recklessly, James,” Crozier tells him. Jopson’s mouth is quirked into a crooked smile as he contemplates the move, fingers tapping against his lips. 

“Did I?” 

Crozier considers for a long moment. “I suppose not, no.” He is rewarded with a quick laugh, and a faint squeak of protestation as Jopson to a prod of his shoulder. 

“Did you hear that, lieutenant? He took a contradiction of opinion.”

Crozier sighs, pointedly and without any heat at all.

“Is there nowhere else you can play your games?” he asks. Fitzjames shakes his head, glances up with a relaxed lilt of his head. 

“Where else should we be, Francis?”

Crozier isn’t sure he has an answer to that.

He falls asleep to the tap of wooden pieces on a board and cheerful proclamations of dismay and camaraderie. They are gone when he wakes again.

For a long time, he lays in bed and stares up at the roof, unblinking. 

“You should never have had to stay,” he says to nobody in particular.

_They_ arrive more often as the years go by, new faces and old, peppering the landscape of his life so that he sometimes does not know into whose eyes he should be looking. Here, Mr Bridgens leans against a boat, talking in low tones to young Peglar; there Lieutenant Irving hovers watching a game of ball played by a chattering of young children. In a quiet corner, gazing over the slow rise and fall of waves, sits Harry Goodsir, all the later scars of his life quite melted away into the young and affable naturalist he had once known. Goodsir walks with him often in the early dawn, pressing him into talk of his life now as much as the little ones ask for tales of his life before. He is much more inclined to oblige the man he knew, and so he does; Crozier keeps no journal these days, and it feels like a confession and a diary both. 

He talks and Goodsir listens.

Perhaps the most surprising ghost of his past turns out to be flesh and blood. Silna arrives in his camp one day, as quietly and as suddenly as she has always done. He is not the only one to go to greet her, but he is the only one who walks out when she goes to leave. Her hair is streaked with grey, there are new scars over her cheek and hands, but she still looks much the same to Crozier as she has always done. There’s an unfamiliar softness in her eyes, however, and when she touches his face, he thinks about how different she must find him now. It doesn’t hurt to think about as much as he once thought it might. They hunt together, sit together, sleep together, and when he goes back to his home, she does not go with him, save for the memory of the touch of her lips against his cheek.

Time passes. He is an old man now, and so used to his ghosts that he does not know or care to tell the difference between them and the living anymore. He wakes to low chatter, or a whispered prayer, and sleeps to the clank of tables and the rough laughter of windswept men. His breath comes harder to him on the mornings he walks with Goodsir; he can feel the rattle in his lungs sharper and deeper every passing day. The others bring him food more often than not, when he cannot find the energy to take himself out from his warm shelter. 

“We were both wrong, you know,” Hickey says. He sits on the foot of Crozier’s bed, a cigarette hanging loose between his lips. Crozier sits up, and the pain crushes in around him like ice on a ship’s hull.

“Easy now, Francis,” Hickey says. “You’ll do yourself an injury.”

“What do you want?” Crozier barks, throat scratching; he can taste metal in his mouth. Hickey shakes his head.

“What did I ever want?” he muses. “Peace, I think.” He looks down at Crozier, and there is no warmth in those blue eyes. “Revenge gets old after a while,” he adds. “I just _wanted_.”

“It would have been easier,” Crozier tells him, “if you knew what it was that you did.”

Hickey nods and takes another drag of his cigarette. “I see that now,” he says. “I see a lot of things now.”

His cigarette flares red in the fading light; the glow of it is the last trace of Cornelius Hickey that Crozier ever sees again.

There is a morning that Crozier wakes again and the pain in his lungs, in his legs, in his heart is gone. He sits up, stands up, and feels his feet land on hard-wood floors. His fingers run wonderingly over navy fabric and brass buttons and he looks up, up and around, at faces he knows even better than his own.

“We should go home, Francis,” says Blanky, standing before him, broad and young and full of more life than Crozier can ever remember having. “Will you lead us this last time?”

He holds out a hand and Crozier takes it. 


End file.
